Friday, January 21, 2011

Cable modem achieves 800 Mbps downstream

Arris is a communications company that manufactures a variety of technology products, including cable modems.

Recently, Arris partnered with South Korea’s largest ISP, SK Broadband, to test super-high speeds capable through a cable modem. The two companies bonded a total of 16 downstream channels and successfully reached speeds as high as 800 Mbps in laboratory settings. The tests used one of SK Broadband’s 16x4 modems.

Unfortunately, the report did not include upstream speed tests. Arris has announced previously that they have conducted upstream tests with another South Korean operator, HCN, but no speeds have been reported.

A few months ago, it was reported that German operator, Kabel Deutschland successfully achieved cable downstream speeds reaching 1 Gbps using Cisco products.

Though these are merely tests, it’s a positive sign that faster and faster speeds are being achieved on the HFC platform which already is universally deployed to over 95% of the nation. For consumers, that means they are more likely to see faster future speeds more quickly and more affordably than if building fiber to every home was the only way to deliver it.

I'm with Larry on this, profit has nhnoitg to do with costs. In a free market, prices are determined by the millions of buyers and sellers interacting, thus the vast majority of economists agree that prices (and value) are subjective, i.e. that each of us values things differently.But being in the entertainment business, I do know that cable, satellite and other distribution mediums are all heavily regulated and given monopoly status by governments (local, county, state, etc). Does anyone have options when it comes to cable service? I never have. Some will say it's impossible to have competition, but what about cell phone service, where competition continues to improve quality and services and costs drop or stay the same. We need more of this in the TV and internet distribution industries.But when you dig deep enough, you see that it's the big cable companies that lobby for all these regulations, as they help write up the restrictions that keep competition out of the picture. I sure wish I had the power to keep competition away, as I could be rich too.

@Steve: I had a similar issue. The techs were very helpful and found no problems as well, but they escalated the issue because they suspected a problem with the fiber-coax node. They confirmed it, put in a maintenance order, and lo and behold, a few days later, I had my full 20Mbit service!

LOL, how can insight ever deliver speeds above 30 is beyond me. I live in Middletown and pay for 20.0 but only get up to 5mb/s daily. Insight has had techs come out 3 times and they say everything is fine. According to insight there must be a "cluster" of users in Middletown causing the speed to slow down. DON'T CHARGE FOR A SERVICE IF YOU CAN'T DELIVER IT